I mean, right from the second section of the article.
If they ever go electric I’m not sure how we’ll know it’s time to take the kids out. Won’t be able to hear them coming.
I'm sure they'll just have an app.
It self disables above something like 10kmh when, as you say, tyre roar is the predominant sound a car makes (unless someone is revving the engine I suppose).
Maybe I'm missing something but I would think at the scale of a bus, a hybrid is even more appealing than at the scale of a sedan.
Even locomotives and one or two earthmoving off-highway trucks have electric transmissions, making them series hybrids (With very small batteries not used for traction)
I think the electric is for infinite torque to get lots and lots of cars moving. But to slow down, "electric" brakes are to bleed off power into resistor banks, not re-capture the electricity.
Meanwhile an electric bus actually has to be efficient, which means batteries and regenerative braking.
With diesel-electrics, there was nowhere to the braking power, so resistor grids were the order of the day. I wonder if it would be possible or worthwhile to outfit them with battery tenders to recapture the current with modern batteries and power-management circuitry.
> From Riksgränsen on the national border to the Port of Narvik, the trains use only a fifth of the power they regenerate. The regenerated energy is sufficient to power the empty trains back up to the national border.
The twist: these trains aren't connected to the grid. They use regenerative braking to charge batteries when carting ore to the coast, and the batteries power the trip back to the mine.
At least it can dump it as heat without also producing fine dust, like mechanical brakes do.
So far you're only seeing hybrid locomotives for trains that stop/start a lot (shunting trains and passenger rail). The cutover for freight will likely take decades because A) locomotive lifetimes are measured in decades and B) longer range freight usually has less stop/start, making it's economical delta less.
As I mentioned above, the freight lines are very conservative with new tech and amortize equipment over decades (often to the point where many rail cars are unsafe, especially outdated tank cars), so even if it exists we won’t see it in practice for awhile yet.
Buses have a completely different use case. They drive a well-known distance, and every day is practically identical. It is fairly easy to scale its battery pack to closely match the actual range needed. Running a true long-distance route like a Greyhound or Flixbus, which physically can't be battery-based yet? Just stick to diesel for now.
Buses stop frequently so regenerative breaking is meaningful and crucially they avoid the horrible cloud of diesel particulates as they pull off. It was really noticeable as a cyclist. About 40% co2 savings over diesel in London.
From the OP:
Cologne is one of the few relatively good news stories for hydrogen bus fleets. Regionalverkehr Köln (RVK) has become the largest operator of hydrogen fuel cell buses in Europe, with a fleet that reached 101 vehicles by late 2024 and is expected to grow to 160 by the end of 2025.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_emission_buses_in_London
Fossil fuels are on the way out because we do expect problems. Do you have something similar for EVs?
If people quit as easily as you say hydrogen car manufacturers should, we wouldn't have much of anything.
The biggest one is efficiency. 40% efficient is one figure I saw, versus 80% for EV's.
Yes, you can refill quicker, but time to "refuel" EV's is dropping precipitously as well, and it's just all around safer than tanking around highly combustible liquid gas.
What are your other metrics? It’s an electric drivetrain with all advantages, but with the range of a gasoline car. Refueling cNG or LNG is standard in Europe, LH2 works just fine.
Google “burning Tesla” for that ridiculous take on why batteries would be inherently safe.
Proton Exchange Membrane is 40-45% efficient. Generating hydrogen from electricity is 70% efficient - meaning for a kWh of input electricity you get 3x the motive power from a BEV.
Then rolling out a refuelling network, with the high pressure tanks and expensive delivery mechanism, will cost far more than installing EV chargers - and that's before we even get onto the CURRENT penetration of EV chargers vs Hydrogen filling stations today (16 in the UK, 54 in the ENTIRE US, and not growing).
Hydrogen might be the solution to emissions from haulage, but BEV's are more than good enough compared to the ICE cars they're replacing for 99.9% of motorists needs. Yes, I'm ignoring the "I need to drive 1000 miles without stopping for fuel, rest, using the bathroom, come back when an EV can do THAT" people.
And on burning EV's, they catch fire at rates 20x lower than ICE cars, and LFP chemistry is far more resistant to thermal runaway.
Now lets talk cost - over the life of the car the BEV will be cheaper to run. Filling a Mirai in the UK will cost you around £90 for 400 miles of range. Charging my EV6 from 0 to 100 will cost me £5.50 for 300 miles of range. We're talking near orders of magnitude difference in cost per mile here - it's almost an unfair advantage that you can charge an EV at home off peak for next to nothing.
The average commute distance is 16 miles, and commutes over 50 miles are quite rare. This means a car with a range of 100 miles would cover the vast majority of use cases. Add some buffer for emergencies and cold weather, and even the 150-mile-range Nissan Leaf is more than enough.
You could also look at once-a-year road trips, of course: a range of 250 to 300 miles is becoming quite common for mid-level SUVs. With current technologies that means a charging session of 30 minutes or so every 3.5 to 4 hours - and it's only getting better. For context, the EU-based commercial truckers have a 45-minute break every 4.5 hours, because non-stop driving for even longer than that poses a safety risk.
BEVs aren't stuck in the 1990s anymore. Their range has significantly improved over the 60-mile range of the GM EV1. If 2025 BEV range is an issue for you, you are the outlier.
Unless the hydrogen fueling nozzle freezes to the car, which is apparently quite common in high humidity weather and/or when multiple cars are fueled consecutively. See e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036031992...
It’s not impossible, but I think you’re underestimating the complexity of doing that safely.
With more engineering work an intrinsically safe PTC heater could be certified and used just fine.
It can be done safely, but adds a lot of complexity on top of all the complexity needed for ICE engines.
Your points are also great.
There are new ways to store hydrogen, but these also need external (=from a separate battery) electricity to release it again and the process is slow and doesn’t provide enough amperage, so it can only be used to slowly charge another big battery that is required for these cars to be able to drive.
I believe all Hydrogen vehicles are using proton exchange membranes still, which have roughly 40-50% efficiency.
And that's before you take into account that even the most cutting edge hydrogen refining processes are around 70% efficient.
So 1kWh of energy input (electricity) will net you 3X the motive power when used directly in a BEV than first being coverted to hydrogen, and then converted back into electricity.[1]
[1] 0.5*0.7 = 0.35.
Proton exchange membranes are very unreliable and expensive. They are also not power-dense, one that powers a bus will be very large.
And that’s before we get to the fuel costs - £90 to go 400 miles in a Mirai, versus £5.50 to go 300 in an EV6.
And if we work at it that number might go the same way as Coal has within our lifetimes.
Not yet. That is the nature of technological R&D - if we had the answers, we wouldn't be doing R&D.
AI before the last decade or so didn't beat other computer technologies in key metrics; should they have stopped developing it? Fusion power doesn't beat fission and other options in key metrics; solar didn't beat other sources in key metrics, including costs, ... - should humanity have stopped developing those things?
Unless you can find a way to double their efficiency, and also get hydrogen down to close to 1:1 energy input to output it's just not an efficienct use of electricity.
I always think of I, Robot where the protagonist gets on a motorcycle and immediately their passenger complains about how dangerous gasoline is.
While not for everybody, EVs have a really great property of being rechargable without much effort on your part. Just spend ~10 seconds plugging it in at home/work and then ~10 seconds unplugging it before your next time. Compared to waiting 20 minutes in line at Costco Gas to save 1 dollar.
On a pretty efficienct ICE that I had I was averaging about 20p per mile driven. On my EV I'm averaging 2.5p per mile driven.
Hydrogen cars will become available only when hydrogen is used as a temporary storage for renewable energy. But probably even there converting it to electricity in industrial scale fuel cell will make more sense.
I wouldn't say solved here. Significantly improved into usability yes, but there are still big issues with batteries:
- their low energy density means it's essentially impossible to have a long range in a small car, every long range EV is necessarily quite large, yet still has a shorter range than a city car
- specific energy remains meh, contributing to weight inflation (though by no means the only factor here)
- low temperature performance remains dreary and something you have to manage (and possibly hack / work around e.g. if your car only does automatic battery conditioning)
- while I think fast charge times are a bit overblown as a single driver on long trips (because stretching / resting every 2-3 hours is a good idea anyway), if you have relief drivers and can relay they're a significant impediment
Not that I think hydrogen has any future mind. But EVs do have a lot of drawbacks. And the amount of power you need available to charge a bus fleet in reasonable time is significant if you do pure battery.
And the fact that hydrogen is most popular in Germany and Japan should provide a clue.
These are countries with well established ICE car industries and therefore shifting to hydrogen provides the least disruption when it comes to their car manufacturing as well as infrastructure.
The disproportionately high interest in hydrogen is likely not being driven because of a belief in its future success, but likely more as a hope to continuing the status quo.
1. Germany's existing industrial capacity in terms of machining is a much closer match to hydrogen than to EVs. So in short it is wishful thinking mixed with a kind of self-preservation.
2. There seems to be a (somewhat unfounded) worry about energy storage when it comes to EVs, that many German technologists think is easier to handle and solve with hydrogen.
3. Germans culturally have a slight tendency to be fascinated by intricate and complex systems (which can also be a bad thing, see bureaucracy). Electric vehicles are conceptionally very simple, so the opposite. Hydrogen is a little bit more involved.
A more complete theory would encompass the Japanese drives as well.
Hydrogen would enable a lot of very rich and powerful businesses to just pivot their business model a bit: the fossil fuel industry would have a destination for "grey hydrogen", pipeline owners could repurpose natural gas pipelines and bunkers for hydrogen, you'd still need refineries, tanker trucks to refill gas stations, you'd still need a nationwide network of gas stations in the first place...
In contrast, electric cars cut out a lot of the middlemen - once you got the car and a solar panel on your roof, you don't need _any_ of these industries any more. And you can't have that.
As a certified old person, I'm having trouble getting used to them. It is unnatural for a double-decker bus to pull up near-silently, and then move off smoothly when you get on. They are _supposed_ to vibrate violently and sound like they might explode at any moment; it's traditional.
(One of the bus route closest to me has a mix of fancy BEV buses and ancient diesel things from 2007, so I get an interesting selection. The other is mostly plugin hybrids, which are extra-disconcerting, as they're either silent or very noisy depending on mode.)